Kinderhook plates

The plates were forged by three men from Kinderhook as part of a plan to discredit Latter Day Saint movement founder Joseph Smith.

In the late 1830s, followers of the nascent Latter Day Saint movement had been expelled from Missouri and were settling in and around modern-day Nauvoo, Illinois.

"[4] Fugate and Wiley decided to "prove the prophecy by way of a joke" and enlisted the help of Bridge Whitton, the village's postmaster and blacksmith, to create a set of six small plates of brass.

Fugate himself stated the purpose was "simply for a joke" on the Latter Day Saint congregants, and one of his sons said that rather than being an elaborate trap for Smith it was "a little plan by which to startle the natives.

It was reported in the Quincy Whig that the reason for his sudden interest in archaeology was that he had dreamed on three consecutive nights that there was treasure buried beneath the mound.

][10] At first, Wiley undertook the excavation alone, and reached a depth of about 10 feet (3.0 m)[11] before he abandoned the work, finding it too laborious an undertaking.

[9] The Times and Seasons, a Latter Day Saint publication, stated that the existence of the Kinderhook plates lent further credibility to the authenticity of the Book of Mormon.

Pratt wrote that the plates contained Egyptian engravings and "the genealogy of one of the ancient Jaredites back to Ham the son of Noah.

[21] In a May 7, 1843, letter to a friend, Pratt wrote, "A large number of Citizens have seen them and compared the characters with those on the Egyptian papyrus which is now in this city.

The September 1962 Improvement Era, an official magazine of the church, ran an article by Welby W. Ricks stating that the plates were genuine.

"[25] In 1980, Professor D. Lynn Johnson of the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at Northwestern University examined the remaining plate.

Using microscopy and various scanning devices, he determined that the tolerances and composition of its metal proved entirely consistent with the facilities available in a 19th-century blacksmith's shop and, more importantly, found traces of nitrogen in what were clearly nitric acid-etched grooves.

He concluded that this plate was one that Smith examined, that it was not of ancient origin, and that it was in fact etched with acid, not engraved, confirming Fugate's 1879 description.